Everything needs regular maintenance to function well without challenges. Besides, maintenance enhances the durability of something in different aspects. In the end, you keep getting value out of something you keep maintaining and caring for.

Just like we often perform vehicle maintenance, the same should be applied to the WordPress website. As the technology keeps taking a new shape, the need to upgrade and update your WordPress will emerge to ensure you keep up with the pace and beat the competition.

But then, how do you perform WordPress maintenance? What are the key aspects you should consider during the process? How often should you perform WordPress website maintenance? And finally, what are the benefits of performing WordPress website maintenance? We shall uncover all this and many other valuable insights on the WordPress website maintenance checklist. Keep reading.

What is WordPress website maintenance all about? Quick Overview

WordPress website maintenance involves a series of tasks you perform to ensure the website remains stable, lasts longer, is always secure, and offers the best speed to all visitors. In most cases, these tasks revolve around SEO site optimization, running malware scans, and processing backups, among many others. We shall discuss the checklist later in this blog. But before then, why do you need to perform WordPress website maintenance?

Importance of WordPress website maintenance

Performing regular WordPress website maintenance has the following benefits or advantages:

• Timely notification & updates

A well-maintained WordPress website will give you real-time updates and notifications whenever an issue arises. This will give you an easy time to understand what and how you need to resolve such issues to minimize malfunctions and downtimes. Besides, such updates will keep the sales on the right track while growing your user base and enhancing your brand reputation.

• Content & Data Protection

Regular WordPress website maintenance helps secure and safeguard your data and content on the website. As a result, you won’t experience technical hitches such as software errors, user-related issues, and other forms of malicious threats.

• Stability & Security

Of course, visitors, or rather website users, tend to avoid unsecured websites at all costs. A WordPress website that isn’t well-maintained leads to security threats and website stability issues, thus leading to a higher bounce rate where users don’t interact with the website fully.

Maintaining such a website guarantees solid security and overall stability.

• Enhances the overall performance of the website

Speed is a crucial element or consideration when measuring the performance of a website. Maintaining a WordPress website regularly means cleaning the digital clutter, compressing the images, and performing database optimization. All these activities ensure the website loads faster, thus boosting the overall user experience. The SEO rankings will also be on the top.

• Regular backups prevent data loss

It can be devastating to lose your website data because of hacking or crashing. Of course, it will cost resources and effort to create a solid website. With regular WordPress website maintenance, you can always restore your data should any issue happen unexpectedly. Your website will then continue to operate as usual without more interruptions.

• Enhances compatibility

Most WordPress elements, such as plugins, themes, and core, get frequent updates. These updates are significant in enhancing the overall performance and functionality of the website. However, there may arise compatibility issues once there are new updates, and this will affect the general functionality of the website.

By maintaining your WordPress website, you ensure all the components of your website, including the updates, are compatible and align with one another for a seamless experience.

• Helps in SEO

SEO is crucial for website rankings. Google will always prioritize a well-maintained WordPress website. This will improve your website rankings and visibility, thus attracting more traffic.

You can enhance the SEO of your WordPress website by updating the emerging SEO practices and ensuring your website is SEO-friendly always to generate more leads and traffic.

• Prevents downtime

Unavailable or inaccessible website is always a nightmare to users, especially when they are in need of specific services from the site.

Through WordPress website maintenance, you can always identify & resolve potential issues that could lead to downtime of your website.

Of course, users often trust and rely more on an easy-to-access website.

Ways you can perform WordPress website maintenance

There are two ways you can perform your WordPress website maintenance. Below is a detailed description of each method:

• The Do It Yourself (DIY) method

This method involves taking care of and performing your website maintenance all by yourself. Here, you can perform tasks such as database optimization, website backup, and themes & plugin updates. When using the DIY approach, always ensure your website is secure & up to date.

Don’t forget to always review potential vulnerabilities when it comes to matters of website security or malicious code. The content, too, should be secured by two-factor authentications and strong passwords.

Above all, always back up your data for easy data restoration in case of data loss.

Well, the DIY method can be daunting and time-consuming, especially when you have other business-related activities you need to focus on. In this case, you can use the method mentioned below:

• Outsourcing WordPress website Maintenance services

This is where Aalpha Information Systems comes in. As an expert WordPress development company, our team will ensure your WordPress Website maintenance process is handled professionally, and no errors or malfunctions when the website is in operation.

When you outsource WordPress website maintenance services, make sure they offer the following services or rather checklist processes for ensuring the reliability and stability of your website:

• Security updates
• Website backup processes
• WordPress plugins and theme updates
• At least website support services that cover potential issues or errors during the updating period
• Testing and optimizing website speed
• SEO updates and reports
• Uptime monitoring of the WordPress website

These are among the basic checks to look out for in a WordPress website maintenance outsourced service provider. Depending on your unique business dealings, the list can be extensive or tailored according to your business.

How often should you perform WordPress website maintenance?

Of course, you maybe be wondering when is the ideal time and how often you need to perform WordPress website maintenance.

Well, different WordPress Websites have diverse functionalities and needs, thus making the website maintenance vary from one site to another.

Therefore, how frequently you should perform WordPress website maintenance depends on the following:

• Website’s traffic
• Complexity nature of the website
• How often do you add new content to the site?

For instance, WordPress core, themes, and plugins require immediate updates, especially when you notice a vulnerability loophole.

On matters of performing website backup, it depends on the update rate. Whenever you add new content to the site, you should update it immediately. Supports you do weekly blogs; you can perform website backups on a weekly basis after adding a new blog.

Performance tests need to be regular. Here, you will need an uptime monitoring system as you review the overall performance of your website. Don’t schedule weekly or monthly performance tests; just do them as often as you can to maintain the reliability & stability of your WordPress website.

WordPress website maintenance checklist

So, what exactly do you check when performing WordPress website maintenance? Below is a detailed description of tasks you should perform on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis, quarterly basis, and yearly basis.

Daily Maintenance checklist

These include tasks you have to perform on a daily basis to ensure the stability and reliability of your WordPress website.

• Website uptime

This task involves checking your WordPress website and ensuring customers can easily access it. When the website is unresponsive, it impacts SEO rankings ad user experience negatively.

Therefore, always check website server uptime daily to identify any possibility of malfunctional and resolve them timely before users get affected.

Refreshing the website over and over again might not be practical in the long run. In this case, you can use automation tools that will monitor the website’s uptime. Examples of such tools are Hyperping or WP umbrella. With these tools, you will always get timely updates regarding your website uptime through Slack or email.

• Website backup

Plugins such as Updraftplus and BackUpWordPress can help you automate the website backup process to ensure the stability of your website. Again, the WP umbrella will help you backup cloud data automatically in case of data loss.

• Scanning for possible threats and vulnerabilities

As part of daily WordPress website maintenance, you need to always scan for corrupted files or malware that can affect the functionality and performance of your WordPress website. While WordPress offers solid security, the site can easily be attacked which can affect user experience or even lead to inaccessibility of the website. WP Umbrella offers vulnerability scans on a WordPress website. You can also explore other WordPress security plugins that will help you automate the processes.

Weekly Maintenance checklist

While daily maintenance tasks are crucial, weekly maintenance tasks also play a big role in ensuring your WordPress website is in a healthy status always. These weekly WordPress maintenance tasks include the following:

• WordPress themes and plugin updates

It is not always a viable idea to keep updating all WordPress files on the go upon new releases. The processes require keen attention and in fact, you might need a specialist to handle the processes to ensure everything is in alignment.

• Widgets updates

Apparently, many WordPress website owners often forget to update widgets. Just like theme and plugin updates help the website function seamlessly, so do the widgets.

• Cache clearing

When you don’t clear the cache, your WordPress website is likely to run slowly, thus affecting the overall user experience.

When you cache the content on your website, you form a static version of the website, thus enhancing faster loading times and overall site performance.

WordPress uses the MySQL database to access and render all the content on the site, which can, in one way, slow down the website’s performance.

With a cache plugin, all the website users will access the static version of the website pages and posts.

Yes, it is essential to cache your WordPress website. However, you must clear the cache as often as possible.

Monthly Maintenance Checklist

These are WordPress website maintenance tasks you perform every month to stabilize your website:

• Moderation of comments

This process is crucial in combating spam comments on the website. With the Akismet plugin, you can automate the processes to prevent spam comments from appearing in the moderation queue.

However, you should be reviewing spam comments from time to time because the Akismet plugin may sometimes flag legitimate comments as spam by mistake.

Once done, you can go on and delete all the spam comments from your WordPress website.

• Removal of broken links

As your website expands and grows, some external links attached to your previous articles may no longer be active. Some may disappear completely, while some may shift.

Again, internal links may experience issues, for instance, when you mistakenly include misspelled links, poorly formatted links, or broken images. This may affect user’s experience as they interact with your website.

You can use a renowned broken link checker plugin to complete this process.

• Replacing broken images

Broken links connected to an external site impact user experience negatively. Again, broken links connected to your site’s content reflect poor user experience on your side.

In most instances, images simply disappear from websites, leading to broken links taking space from the working links, and this affects the overall functionality of your WordPress website. For instance, WordPress settings change, posts & pages are moved, and the URL pattern changes, thus affecting website performance and functionality.

Therefore, fix broken images as often as you can.

• Removing unused plugins and themes

Inactive or unused plugins and themes can lead to security threats, which in turn affects the overall functionality of your WordPress website.

In fact, the website can end up crashing and experiencing countless security breaches due to irrelevant plugins which in turn slows down the website performance.

That is why you need to check and remove unnecessary themes and plugins from your WordPress website.

• Evaluating the Google page speed score

Image size, type of themes & plugins, and hosting, among many other factors, impact the overall performance of your WordPress website.

Therefore, you need to perform some tests to evaluate your website performance and determine measures to improve website performance speed. Through Google PageSpeed Insights, you can review the state of your website and determine areas that need improvement.

Besides, you can implement tools such as WP Umbrella to track the general performance of your website via a single dashboard.

• Testing device and browser compatibility

You want to ensure that users using different browsers and devices can access your website seamlessly. Therefore, you need to perform compatibility checks regularly to create smooth access to your website.

Chrome’s device mode is a collection of tools available in Chrome used for the simulation of mobile devices. You can use it to perform and test browser and device compatibility on your website.

• Fixing 404 errors

404 error page pops up when a user tries to request a page that doesn’t exist on your site. This happens commonly when a user mistypes an address. When this happens, it creates a bad user experience. No user wants to remain stranded on your website trying to access some services. Therefore, you should track and redirect 404 errors to enhance the user experience when interacting with your WordPress website. You can use Google Search Console to complete these processes.

• Fixing PHP errors

PHP errors are a result of using poor code themes and plugins which in turn conflicts with your WordPress website.

While such errors may seem not a big deal, they give insightful information to hackers about your website dealings and can also slow down your website performance.

To complete this process, enable WordPress to debug mode, then disable it afterward.

Alternatively, you can use the WP umbrella by embedding the PHP monitoring feature if you don’t want to use the WordPress debug mode and save more time.

• Testing contact forms

Here, you can use WPFForms for WordPress form builders to enhance a professional outlook on your website.

However, these forms may fail to send emails suddenly because of WordPress hosting server misconfiguration with your email provider.

Always review your contact forms regularly to ensure they are fully functional.

Quarterly Maintenance Checklist

• Change all WordPress IDs

You need unique and strong passwords for all your online accounts, and the same should apply to the WordPress website, database, and FTP accounts.

One this for sure is that even when you put strong passwords, they can be compromised with time without your knowledge. That is why it is recommendable to keep changing all your WordPress IDs from time to time.

• Remove dormant WordPress users

Your WordPress website needs to have only active admins who have access to several services within your website.

For this reason, perform quarterly audits and remove all dormant users.

• Review images Alt texts

Alt texts in WordPress is a process of adding image descriptions on your website to help the visually impaired and blind access your website via screen reader.

All your images need to have these alt texts to enhance SEO. When there are many missing alt texts, you can use an image SEO optimizer plugin to fill the missing alt texts automatically and make your website accessible to all.

• Review the expiry date of premium licenses

If you are using yearly subscription plans for your themes and plugins, make sure you review the expiry dates and work on them in a timely manner. In this case, too, don’t forget about your website host.

• Verify WordPress security logs

This checklist for maintaining your WordPress website helps you keep all the log activities, thus enabling you to track the activities on your site.

Information about activity logs, such as users involved, time, and date, helps handle events when they happen unexpectedly.

Again, with these details, you can track several hacking attempts. Here, you can use the WP Security Audit log plugin to perform the processes. This plugin is available for free in the WordPress plugin directory.

• WordPress database optimization

All the WordPress website content is stored in the MySQL database since the WordPress content management system is a database-driven platform.

Your website database may hold a lot of irrelevant information from time to time. This information can be from spam comments, draft posts, and used plugins, among many others.

Optimizing MySQL database eliminates irrelevant data and enhances the overall database functionality and performance.

You can use WP Clean Up, WP-Optimize, and WP-DBManager plugins to optimize your database seamlessly.

• Review RSS feeds of the website

The RSS feeds will automatically show to the users or subscribers once you update your site or add new content. Therefore, it is crucial to track these RSS feeds to ensure they are working perfectly, and this will help you maintain higher traffic.

Of course, some users still rely on RSS feeds even though they seem outdated. What’s more, some apps use RSS feeds to notify subscribers about new blog updates, and that is why you shouldn’t ignore them.

• Clear media library

If your site has been on and active for some time, there is no doubt you have several images, and chances are, you aren’t using all these images; hence, they are taking up lots of space for nothing.

That is why you need to clean up your media library as often as you can to keep your site healthy. When clearing the media library, don’t forget to use plugins such as Semush or Imagify plugins to optimize and compress the images.

• Send Maintenance Reports

As a way of building a solid and good relationship between your WordPress service provider (can be a freelancer or an agency), send regular maintenance reports to show the professionality of your work and dealings.

Yearly Maintenance Checklist

These tasks aren’t as significant as the ones we’ve discussed before. However, when performing WordPress website maintenance, it is good to consider them, too, and you can perform them annually.

• Content auditing and SEO optimization

Make sure you review your content using Google Analytics data and Google Search Console.

Google Search Console helps you analyze the search terms that appear on the results page. You can then use the keywords to update the existing articles for higher rankings.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, helps you review users who are visiting your site and the activities they are performing. With the details, you can know areas that have increased traffic but low conversion rates, thus giving you an idea of what to do to achieve a higher conversion rate.

Above all, don’t forget to update your blogs, even if it is once per year, to enrich the value of your content and enhance SEO rankings.

• Cancel Toxic Links

Sometimes, backlinks from unreliable sites will impact your site performance negatively, especially on SEO. This leads to a decline in the number of organic visitors.

The toxicity of backlinks can be due to previous less-than-white-hat linking or it can be just natural.

• Review About Us Page & Copyright

As you strive to keep your website up to date, don’t forget to touch on the copyright details, as it enriches user loyalty and trust.

You can use the PHP function to automate this process.

Conclusion

WordPress website maintenance is a crucial step for all website owners who want to scale their sites to the next level. These are simply activities that enhance the overall functionality and performance of your website all the time. We’ve included tasks or rather checklists you need to perform on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis, quarterly basis, and finally, on a yearly basis.

With these activities in place, you can be sure of smooth, faster, and reliable WordPress services and an enhanced user experience.

Back to You!

Looking for help with WordPress website maintenance services? At Aalpha Information Systems, we bring over a decade of experience to provide the right solution. Contact us today!